I’ve worked with hundreds of businesses since 1977 as an employee and consultant, and chuckle every time I see business held up as a model of innovation and efficiency. As the previous commenter notes, organizational behavior is similar across sectors; people tend to glob on to a new idea and bureaucratize, over-professionalize and misapply it until a satirist like the AL or Dilbert holds a mirror up.

I do applaud libraries’ emerging willingness to take lessons from other sectors — they just need to be a bit more selective about which practices they model.

As far as disinterest goes, it seems to be common knowledge outside of business schools that a decision is made, and then a committee convened to prove the decision was the right one. E.g. “We should sell big, powerful, inefficient cars.” And for efficiency, I used to buy used scientific equipment from dealers who got it from departments in businesses like Motorola and Intel who had to spend their budgets by the end of the year or risk getting it cut for next year– no bonuses there for saving money. Heck, my work just lost $2000 unnecessarily because of interference from those a step or two further up the food chain– they knew it and didn’t care. Meanwhile, parcel rates for the US Post Office aren’t significantly different than for UPS or FedEx, privatized prisons aren’t cheaper to run than public prisons, and the stories I’ve gotten coming out of libraries suggest that they’re as concerned with efficiency as anyone.

Libraries and other public firms may not have investors breathing down the necks of the boards of directors, but they do have external review, and budgets set by external players who are never going to give them as much as they want. And as far as the workers lower down on the totem pole, it doesn’t make any difference at all to them whether their $8.50 per hour is coming from public or private sources. E.g. cashier or page, or phone center at a bank or a department of revenue.

Basically, I’ve seen no reason to think that private businesses and public agencies are not just two examples of firms. A firm is a firm, and there can be more variation in, e.g., culture and procedures in two private businesses in the same industry than there are between the private and public worlds in general.

And since a firm is a firm, businesses probably have something to teach libraries as long as you keep in mind that it’s not about the profit motive. But profit or not, there are still measures of success, and methods to achieve them. Look more at project management, quality control, reward systems… The ways that organizations achieve goals generalize beyond businesses making money.

However, this will also mean, if my bookstore experience is anything to go by, that before we go broke we will be unable to find anything that isn’t in a dump display by the front door.

On the other hand, “libraries as a business” got all sorts of MBA-types lots of well-paid and dutyless jobs from their friends.

So I guess that’s what “like a business” is actually about – the ascendancy of the MBA caste.

It has to be cash.

I have had some wonderful vacations this way.

Unfortunately, my idea was to eliminate bonuses, so I never got one.

Ahhhhh, the cruel irony of working in the real world.